The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Socialists were another matter. Had Villain missed his mark on July 31, Jaurès would have lived to see comrades who had only recently been standard-bearers of antimilitarism rallying around the flag—as he himself intended to do if all else failed—and conferring the virtue of revolutionary evangelism upon their newfound ardor. When France had been besieged by Austria and her allies in 1792–93, had she not, in her victorious retaliation, brought Enlightenment to the benighted Europe of kings and autocracies? Patriotism displaced internationalism in pronouncements—patriotism construed not as an expression of xenophobic intolerance but as internationalism in another guise. (Many Germans, notably Hugo Haase in the Reichstag, were professing their love of country just as ardently across the Rhine). Jean Longuet, Karl Marx’s grandson, declared on August 2 during a rally at the Salle Wagram:

  If France is invaded, how could Socialists not be the first to defend the France of the Revolution and of Democracy, the France of the Encyclopédie, of 1793, of June 1848, the France of Pressensé, of Jaurès? They know that in doing so they will be reviving the motto of ’93: “Peace for the world’s peoples! War against its kings!”

  Four years later, when Socialists were reciting mea culpas over 1,385,000 French graves, including that of Jean Jaurès’s only son, a steadfast antimilitarist named Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, who had nothing to repent of, reviewed the enthusiasms of 1914 from a sober perspective. “The truth of the matter is,” he declared at a union congress,

  that if we had wished to resist [as he in fact had done] on July 31, 1914, we would have been swept away by the torrent of chauvinism surging through the country. The truth is, and one must have the courage to admit it, that one cannot stage a general strike without strikers; there can be no insurrection without insurrectionists. Even if we had tried to apply the resolutions of our union congress, we would have been repulsed by those same laboring masses who, now weary of the war, reproach us for not having acted back then. Comrades, we did nothing, because we could do nothing.

  The occasion was not appropriate to air another truth, that many who might have stood firmer in the chauvinist tide lost their footing with Jaurès’s departure. The “great tribune” had been the Socialists’ backbone and compass.5

  On the morning of August 4, Raymond Poincaré, René Viviani, ministers, senators, and fellow deputies, including Maurice Barrès, president of the ultranationalist Ligue des Patriotes, gathered with leaders in Passy, where Jaurès had lived, to deliver eulogies over his coffin. A large crowd had come at the behest of the CGT,6 which promised that the funeral ceremony would be the ultimate demonstration of pacifist vigor.

  But what they heard, for the most part, on the day after Germany declared war against France and only hours after a German army violated Belgian neutrality, were orations posthumously enlisting Jaurès in the cause of national solidarity. “At this tomb, on which the most passionate of men lies inanimate,” declared Premier Viviani, “I summon all French to reconcile their differences, to unite and achieve supreme concord. The great tribune, if he could rise, trembling, would express himself no differently.” Édouard Vaillant, a venerable Socialist who had fled France after the 1871 Commune of Paris, had lived abroad until 1880 (when Communards received amnesty), and had fought the good fight since 1893 as a deputy fiercely opposed to national armies, projected his support of the government through Jaurès. “What he would say, how he would advise us, if he were present?” he asked. “He would say that at this moment, when, facing the prospect of a general catastrophe, all the forces of barbarism, all the powers of imperialist militarism are being unleashed against us, we must not lose our internationalist faith, nor even allow it to slacken. He would recommend poise. He would have us bear in mind the battles that will follow the great battle now upon us, and remember that afterward we shall have to contend with the spirit of militarist reaction that may vanquish the victor. That is what he would tell us.… So, let us swear to do our duty, for our Fatherland, for the Republic, for the Revolution.” Equally confident that Jaurès would have wanted workers to do their duty in a war justified as an Armageddon-like contest against imperialism was Léon Jouhaux, secretary-general of the CGT.7 Others followed, making similar pledges of allegiance, much to the satisfaction of Maurice Barrès, whose seat in the National Assembly had placed him, ideologically, at the farthest remove from Jean Jaurès.

  Jean Jaurès’s funeral cortège proceeding from Passy to the Gare d’Orléans on August 4, 1914.

  In 1924, Jaurès’s remains were interred near Zola’s in the Panthéon. Until then he lay buried at Carmaux in the Tarn valley, his birthplace. On August 4, 1914, thousands of Parisians lined the streets to bid him farewell as the funeral cortège wended its way from Passy, along the Avenue Henri Martin, past the Trocadéro, to the Place de la Concorde, and thence to the Gare d’Orléans for the long train voyage south. Later that day, fellow deputies who normally sat on either side of him in the National Assembly commemorated his absence by leaving the bench empty. They had reconvened there after the funeral to hear the government rally France and prescribe measures needed in defense of the homeland.

  Poincaré declared that France had been the object of a brutal, premeditated aggression; that for forty years the French, in repressing their desire for “legitimate reparations,” had set an example of an impeccably peaceful, conciliatory nation, had pulled France up by her bootstraps and used her renewed strength “to advance progress and the good of humanity.” France’s heroic sons, charged with defending her, would present the picture of a “sacred union.” No mortal enemy could pry apart the brotherhood. They would stand “as one” in their patriotic faith and their “indignation against the aggressor.”

  Premier Viviani, in a much longer address reviewing the events of recent European history, bestowed upon France the virtues of a medieval knight. She was “sans peur et sans reproche” (fearless and irreproachable). She was the guardian of liberty at war with the powers of night. “Under siege,” he declaimed, “are the freedoms of which France, her friends and allies are proud to be the defenders. They are what is at stake; everything else is a pretext.” Lest France’s foes think the less of her as a physical force for prizing peace, piety, and enlightenment above military prowess, Viviani insisted that virtue was not without the strength to wield a mighty sword.

  A strong, free people who uphold an age-old ideal and are indissolubly one in safeguarding its existence; a democracy which has been able to discipline its military effort and did not fear, during this past year, to increase the weight of it to match neighboring armaments; an armed nation fighting for its own life and the independence of Europe—that is the spectacle we honorably offer witnesses to this formidable struggle.… France has often proved, in less favorable conditions, that she is a most redoubtable adversary when she fights for liberty and justice, as is the case now.

  The Gallic cock at its most combative, clawing back the two provinces ceded to Germany in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War. “Enfin!”—At last!—expresses the sentiments of revanchists, zealots bent on avenging their loss.

  Ovations punctuated every sentence. Newspapers across the political spectrum describe a revival meeting rather than a parliamentary session, and conservative reporters found nothing but glory in this anomalous communion. Where parties—each with more than one mind of its own—had traditionally wrangled, here politicians exemplified the “Union Sacrée.” Now that Parliament had ceased to be a forum for cranky debate, the institution was at last “worthy of France,” opined Le Figaro. And the French could now be French, imbued with common ideals of brotherhood, salvation, and sacrifice. It was as if war, under a Republic forever teetering at the brink, abolished the threat of revolution. Older deputies exempt from military service embraced younger ones. Spectators in the galleries applauded. It was great theater, according to a journalist reporting for Le Figaro. After the last words had been spoken, people filed silently out of the hall in which had occurred “one of the grandest, most
beautiful things that we veteran observers of party strife have ever been privileged to witness.”

  In Berlin, where only two members of the German Reichstag had voted against war credits, Kaiser Wilhelm said, “Henceforth I know no parties; I know only Germans.”

  · · ·

  September 1914. An Englishwoman offering cigarettes to a grateful cuirassier.

  No one rejoiced more exuberantly than Maurice Barrès, a militant in party warfare since 1889. This Lorrainer gave full voice to his belief that blood was needed to reconsecrate France, to regenerate it, to liberate the energy held in thrall by arid philosophy, to do everything Jaurès had condemned as “vitalism.” For Barrès, the curtain had fallen on individual consciousness. August 4, 1914, was a day on which true Frenchmen, practicing Catholics and lapsed alike, could not tell God’s blessing from the warm sun. “Even if it involves the awful lessons of battle,” proclaimed Barrès, “I’ve wanted nothing more than for Frenchmen to unite around the great ideas of our race. So they have. Blood has not yet rained upon our nation and war has already made us [at the Assembly] feel its regenerative powers. It is a resurrection.”

  The army—whose prestige, Barrès and others felt, ought to have taken precedence over considerations of justice for one wretched soul, Alfred Dreyfus—had been grievously insulted; but war would set France straight. The celebrants prophesied in chorus that a decadent nation would regain its health once released from the drear monotony—the horrible quotidien—of peacetime. Fire, mortal danger, and the common enemy would enforce a collective truth. At the front, disparate elements would fuse into the “organic” society so loathsome to Kant-besotted intellectuals, for whom France’s honor had depended upon the exculpation of a Jew. Men suddenly plucked out of civilian life and thrown together in their hundred thousands would not suffer from anomie. On the contrary, the battlefield would seat them in their Frenchness. Those who died would die as martyrs to the cause of national rebirth.

  August 1914. Departing for the front.

  Almost everywhere, religious fervor sounded the call to arms along with bellicose patriotism, ignoring Pope Benedict XV’s effort to reconcile the warring parties. “The task of Christians consists in preparing, stimulating, hastening, in the bosom of our Churches first of all, then of all our people, a government of repentance and of faith,” declared one eminent ecclesiastic. Joan of Arc rode again. Church joined state in the sacred union, the sacredness of which rested upon the moral certainty that France stood for civilization and Germany for barbarism. Barrès called the Germans “Orientals,” soon to be vulgarized as “Huns.”8

  1Casus foederis describes a situation in which the terms of an alliance come into play. A country may be compelled to declare war, for example, if its ally is attacked.

  2“Revanchism,” or “revengism,” was the term for a political agenda based on the abiding desire to gain revenge for the military defeat of 1870–71 and recapture Alsace and Lorraine.

  3Moltke shared Paléologue’s feeling of inevitability: “This is the way things will and must develop, unless, one might almost say, a miracle takes place to prevent at the eleventh hour a war which will annihilate the civilization of almost the whole of Europe for decades to come. Germany does not want to bring about this terrible war. But the German Government knows that it would fatally wound the deeply rooted sentiment of allied loyalty, one of the finest traits of the German spirit, and place itself at variance with all the feelings of its people.”

  4Like Henriette Caillaux, Villain was acquitted, but only after spending the entire war in prison. His trial took place in March 1919. The defense attorney, Alexandre Zévaès, addressed the jurors as follows: “Your sentence will have no political significance. It will be a verdict of pardon and forgetfulness effacing our prewar hatreds.” In L’Humanité, Marcel Cachin asked what the true meaning of the jury’s “lamentable gesture” may have been. “Perhaps it meant to affirm that … the real assassin [the warmongering demagogues], who had found a mere instrument in Villain, was not in court, that they didn’t want to incarcerate the poor stooge who, on a day of lunacy, had held the revolver that killed our friend. Or perhaps this jury of Parisian bourgeois privately approved of his abominable act. We are told that the verdict was reached quickly.”

  5After the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915, at which Lenin organized opposition to the “imperialist war,” he wrote the pamphlet Socialism and War, denouncing Socialists who collaborated with their national governments as “social-chauvinists.”

  6The Confédération Générale du Travail—a large confederation of unions.

  7Jouhaux delivered a feeble palinode after the war, in 1918, at the thirteenth congress of the CGT. “What was the psychological phenomenon, so to speak, that oriented my thought in the direction it took?” he asked, referring to his eulogy at Jaurès’s funeral. “I’m hard put to say what it was. There are circumstances in the life of a man that make him evoke more or less forcefully thoughts that seemed foreign to him but which are the baggage of traditions he carries within himself. Perhaps I lived one of those moments.” His capitulation to the war effort was, he implied, attributable to the martial impulse of his revolutionary unconscious. On the Right and Left, the unconscious was invoked for good and ill, as a responsible party.

  8A young soldier writing from the front formulated a German version of the received idea: “We know full well that we are fighting for the German idea of the world, that we are defending German feeling against Asiatic barbarism and Latin indifference.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Making of a Xenophobe

  Maurice Barrès [was] one of the most influential writers of contemporary France. Few young men drawn to a career in letters between the 1880s and the eve of World War I escaped his power of seduction.

  —MICHEL WINOCK in Le Siècle des Intellectuels

  If M. Barrès had not lived, if he had not written books, his age would be different and so would we. I don’t see any contemporary in France who has exerted, through literature, comparable or equal influence. Like Voltaire and Chateaubriand, he has created not the temporary scaffolding of a system but something more intimately bound up with our lives: a new attitude, a new cast of mind and sensibility.

  —LÉON BLUM in La Revue Blanche, November 15, 1897

  Friends and foes might have agreed that moral certainty was at home in Maurice Barrès, who unabashedly spoke of wanting to “educate” and “illustrate” the sensibility of his generation. The National Assembly gave him political heft after 1889 as an elected deputy from Nancy, but more important for a writer prolific even by the standards of his age was the printed page. Between the 1880s and the 1920s—throughout the would-be coup d’état of General Boulanger, the Panama Scandal, the Dreyfus Affair, the parliamentary debate over the separation of church and state, the war—he filled a hundred volumes with essays, chronicles, and fiction that expound his successive enthusiasms.

  The name Barrès, which derives from the Auvergnat word for a palisaded bastion, was well suited to this man, whose exclusionary creed rooted Frenchness in the soil and bound it to the dead. It’s as if his patronymic shaped his ends. He was born eight years before the war of 1870–71, when Prussian troops overran Lorraine and occupied his native town of Charmes-sur-Moselle, fifteen miles south of Nancy. A grandfather from the Auvergne, Jean-Baptiste Barrès, who had served in Napoleon’s army, married the daughter of a tanner in Charmes, settled there, bought land, and produced one child before his young wife died. Brought up motherless, Jean-Auguste Barrès entered a loftier circle of provincial society in 1859 by marrying Claire Luxer, the daughter of a rich pharmacist. They, in turn, had two children, Anne-Marie and Auguste-Maurice.

  To all appearances, Maurice’s childhood was that of a serious boy securely ensconced in a privileged little world over which the fifteenth-century Église Saint-Nicolas spread its mantle. He was taught to write by Sisters of the Christian Doctrine. He sang in the church choir. He learned his catechism. He fix
ed his mind every Sunday at mass on the stained-glass image of three skeletons lecturing three carefree young gentlemen. He enjoyed, albeit timidly, the ritual antics of Holy Week.1

  A complement to religious instruction—salutary in several ways—was Walter Scott’s Richard Coeur de Lion en Palestine (The Talisman), all twenty-six chapters of which his mother had read to him when, at age five, he lay bedridden with typhoid fever. “At this moment,” he reminisced in his Cahiers, “my imagination seizes on several ravishing figures that will always inhabit me. The damsels, who are angels, the Orient: they slept in the depths of my mind, along with the harmony of my young mother’s voice, until reawakened during adolescence.” Other Waverley novels followed. Secretly exploring his parents’ library, he discovered books quite beyond his ken but the more pertinent for being inaccessible—Jean Cabanis’s On the Relations Between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, for example. Later, in correspondence with her son, Claire would recommend the articles of Jean Charcot’s student Alfred Binet.2

  One of Barrès’s fondest memories was of excursions east from Charmes to the medieval ruins of Andlau and west to Sion-Vaudémont, a pilgrimage site in the Vosges Mountains, where Celts and Gallo-Romans had worshipped their gods before Christianity displaced them. Perched high above thirty other villages in a wide swath of countryside extending almost to Joan of Arc’s birthplace, it retained vestiges of the citadel demolished during the seventeenth century, when France absorbed Lorraine. For Maurice, who returned to it at every age, like an eagle to its first aerie, and wrote about it lyrically, Vaudémont would always be “la colline inspirée.”3

  In childhood, those trips to the hilltop may have offered a reprieve from the mystifying inhibitions of home life. He remembered his father spending much of the day alone rolling cigarettes and reading Virgil, or playing piquet at the neighborhood café. A frail, taciturn man who collected enough rent from inherited property to employ his time as he saw fit, Auguste had few words for his family. He was kind but remote. Claire Barrès, tormented by migraines, which conjugal life did not alleviate, took to residing almost year-round among bourgeois ladies awaiting surgery or diagnosed as “neurasthenic” in a rest home at Strasbourg. Ministered to by nuns of the Soeurs de la Toussaint order, she became an absentee to her two children, though Auguste left one or the other with her for brief sojourns when he visited Strasbourg. Maurice, who never forgot the sight of wimpled sisters flitting down long corridors, sometimes said—as if in wishful thinking—that he was raised in a hospice. “I liked sorrow.”